Idle essays

Okay, so I finally got around to confronting the dead coral snake, also known as my latest Fail in the bead necklace department. When the thing fell apart, only about half the beads shot off and scattered all over the floor. Only about a third of them rolled under the freezer. Since the thing was about three times too long, this was not the end of the universe. Nor of the coral snake.

Spent a fair amount of the day pulling hundreds of seed beads off the broken strands of upholstery thread and stringing them on wire. Added some grayish glittery Swarovski beads here and there. This helped a little to mute the reptilian look. Instead of trying to make it one continuous loop, I attached a craftsy-looking clasp, mooting the how-to-run-it-all-together headache. And then I added a little “tail” to the thing, with a little silver dragonfly at the end.

These ministrations resulted in a pretty versatile affair: you can wear it in one long flapperish strand or wrap it twice around your neck, and you can let the dragonfly dangle seductively down the back of your neck or turn the beads around and wear the charm in front.

Not such a ridiculous disaster now…maybe it’s even good enough to offer at the upcoming silent auction. Will have to think about that.

Then it was on to experimenting with designing the proposed Anglican rosary, now that the pretty little Mexican cross is in hand. The various mounds of jasper I’d ordered from Fire Mountain hadn’t arrived, but I had an old cross that predates my last period of apostasy.

For the beta version of the rosary project, then, I used the old choir cross, which looks kind of like pewter, five 10-mm beads of aventurine or amazonite (not sure which it is), 28 rondelles of African jade, and heaven only knows how many 6-mm beads of gray feldspar. The color combination went pretty well with the pewtery cross. I used silver- and gold-toned glass seed beads as spacers.

Not a bad effect, but way, way too long. I’d strung three feldspar beads to function like a “chain” between the actual prayer beads, and that was just too many. Eventually I’ll take it apart and rebuild it…am thinking it should have no more than one feldspar spacer between the aventurine and African jade pieces — but maybe not even that. Maybe none. It may be that the silver and gold glass beads alone will suffice.

Along about the time this got finished, the mail arrived, bearing the new jasper beads. The variety called “fancy jasper” is really very pretty. I expect I’ll use the ten-mm fancy jasper for the cruciform beads and the “invitatory,” and then fill in the “weeks” with autumn jasper, a lovely, warm stone. A hundred sterling silver beads came in package, too; they’ll make very classy spacers.

Thanks to the beta version, I think one of these silver things between each bead will suffice. 🙄

I’ve got some turquoise rondelles and tubes laying around in there, liberated from long-defunct pieces of jewelry. I’m thinking one or two of those could decorate the dangle from which the crucifix is suspended, highlighting the Southwestern effect.

My friend Carol came up with two really cool old stone crosses. Since I’ll have enough beads left over to supply the entire parish with these things, I may make those into rosaries, too.

How d’you like these gladioli?

$1.99 for five long stalks of these things, at Trader Joe’s yesterday! Hot diggety!

 

 

By golly! Funny is once again hosting the Carnival of Personal Finance this weekend! The thing goes live on Monday, so be sure to send your submissions by about mid-day on Sunday — no later than 5 p.m. Mountain Standard Time, which is the same as 5 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Kind of a weird week here. Personally, I’ve been crippled up by the back/hip/whatever-the-heck-it-is enough that I haven’t felt like working or playing. It’s been hotter than a three-dollar cookstove outdoors, and with rain coming in for the so-called monsoon season, just freaking soggy. Couple of days ago, I washed my hair after getting out of the pool about 8:30 a.m….at 1:15 it was still damp!!! And it’s not even very long yet. At all.

Look at this charming thing I found on Etsy, at a shop called LizzyStuff:

How cool is that, I ask you?

It’s going to be the focal piece of an Anglican rosary that I intend to make and donate to this year’s silent auction for the choir. It’s a one-of-a-kind (as far as the shop owner knows) made-in-Mexico vintage piece. The plan is to create a Southwestern motif by selecting silver or copper, malachite or turquoise, and lapis for the thirty-three beads.

Actually, this project is the offspring of a massive Fail, possibly one engineered by a bemused God Herself.

With three pieces already in the can, I decided to combine piles and piles of seed beads ( 🙄 for which I had never been able to find any use…) into a long rope that a woman could wrap around her neck a few times or simply allow to hang long and loose.

It took for-freaking-ever to make this stupid thing. I fiddled and fiddled and fiddled with the design to get it just right, combining vast numbers of green, red, gold-tone, and silver seed beads with units of pearls, red seed beads, and tiny silver spacers to create just the right “rhythm.”

Along about halfway through this endless project, it dawned on me that I didn’t know how to connect the thing into a single uninterrupted strand without putting in an ugly crimp bead. And worse, the small silver beads would NOT let me run the wire back through them to secure the connection, crimp or no. All through the mind-numbing process of arranging 44 inches of these things just. exactly. so, I contemplated this conundrum. And finally it occurred to me:

Why not string the things on heavy thread, rather than wire? Then instead of having to crimp the ends together, all that would be required would be a good knot.

Sounds good, doesn’t it? I suppose you can guess where this is going.

So I threaded the damn things on three long (long, long) strands of heavy nylon upholstery thread. And it worked! It looked great! Tied them off and felt mighty proud.

Well. Sorta.

Held this elaborate rope of shiny beads up to the light and realized…hm. The pattern of green and red and gold tubular beads looked exactly like a coral snake.

Yes. A colorful green and red and gold hyper-venomous serpent.

Now, realistically…how many women would think of that?

Indeed. One woman thought of it. Strikes me that suggests a fair number of women just might think of it.

In that case, of course they’ll all run to plunk down $80 or $100 bucks for the thing. Of course. Who wouldn’t?

Argh.

I set it down and went away, so as to look at it by the light of another day.

Comes a new dawn.

I go back and look at it again, and yup! Looks exactly like a coral snake.

Ohkayyyy….maybe it would look better in the wearing. I sling it around my neck and

PLING!!!!!

The knot gives way and a jillion little goddamn green and yellow and gold and silver beads FLY ALL OVER THE ROOM!!!!!!!

Bleyachhh! I give up. Toss the remainder down and go away.

At first it seemed best to just submit the several pieces I’d already made. But then, from out of nowhere, the idea of creating a rosary formed. I have no idea where that came from. I do not pray the rosary myself, and come to think of it, I didn’t even know there was such a thing as an Anglican rosary, although I have seen one of our clergy wearing something that looked a great deal like a string of prayer beads.

So there it is. Did a little research and learned the RC rosary is pretty elaborate and comes in several flavors. My friend, fellow jewelry-maker, and partner in musical crime is going to bring over several of her own tomorrow when we junket out to Scottsdale, so I’ll be able to see what those look like and maybe get some good ideas. Then once a design is on paper, I’ll order up the beads or buy them from local purveyors, and from there it shouldn’t be long before the finished product is in hand.

The Southwestern motif, which came about purely by the serendipity of an Etsy search, is amazingly appropriate, not just because we’re here in Phoenix but because of what the church in question is and how it came about. One of its original founders, who was a practically inseparable friend of the church’s founding pastor, Paul Urbano, was Paul M. Roca, who was what we might call old Arizona. These two developed a passion for tracking down and exploring Jesuit missions in northern Mexico. Paul Roca acquired one of the early Toyota Land Rovers, a jeep-like affair capable of taking on all terrains, and the two of them made a habit of taking off for the wilds of Sonora and Chihuahua. Paul wrote several books on the subject, describing the churches and ruins they found as they tried to follow in the steps of the missionaries through southern Arizona and Mexico.

The two men as well as the church, founded in the heart of what was then the city’s most affluent district, were central to the development of Phoenix from its small-town Southwestern roots to one of the largest cities in the United States.

So. Southwestern rosary. What could be more perfect?

Images:

Hecho in Mexico crucifix, shamelessly ripped off the Internet.
Coral snake. Norman Benton. Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.

 

 

Stupid Reasons:

1. It’s only a little pasta.

2. I swam 50 laps yesterday. That’s almost a mile. Or so.

3. Don’t you think losing 1.7 pounds overnight is a bit much? Maybe we should put the brakes on this dieting phenomenon for a day or so.

4. On other days when I’ve fallen off the Diet Wagon, nothing has happened. In fact, after I ate the lamb souvlaki pita and the deliciously greasy French fries sprinkled liberally with feta cheese, the weight went down 1.2 pounds.

5. I can’t face another bowl of baked eggplant. 😛

6. It’s a hideous hot, cloudy, steamy day that’s so miserable the air is clammy even indoors where the AC is blasting away. This calls out for comfort food.

7. It would be a shame to let all those beautiful, sweet  Campari-type tomatoes go to waste. They call out to be made into comfort food.

8. I can’t face another plateful of cabbage salad. Or any other kind of salad.

9. It’s so hot in here that Cassie can barely bring herself to harass the Human with Ball. She needs a piece of limp spaghetti to cheer her up.

10. M’hijito has gone incommunicado and will not answer requests to help his crippled mom haul a year’s supply of pool chlorine tablets back to the house from Costco. This calls for comfort food.

11. The ongoing PITA hurts so much I can’t even contemplate dragging through a regular grocery store, to say nothing of limping almost to the back of a gigantic Costco. That also cries out for comfort food.

12. Harvey broke last night and today ran up a $70 repair bill.

13. That comes a day after the $100+ tab for cleaning out the DE filter, which in this ungodly heat must have damn near kilt the service dude.

14. An unplanned $170 in pool bills leaves too little money to buy a year’s worth of pool  tablets from Costco, anyway.

Real Reasons

15. On top of their usual round of headaches and the days of not knowing whether the house in Yarnell is still standing, La Maya and La Bethulia have both come down with a nasty bug. Other people’s misery should be acknowledged and honored with comfort food.

16. Half of beloved Yarnell has been reduced to piles of ashes. Many homeowners there were uninsured. It remains to be seen how much, if any, of the town will be rebuilt.

17. Nineteen fine young men were lost to the pile of ashes. In making the loss of half the town seem insignificant, this also makes the event infinitely worse.

18. No one seems to know when the residents there will be able to return to their property. Water and power are out; the water situation was described by a Yavapai County Sheriff’s deputy as “extremely bad,” and cleanup crews want to replace all the propane tanks, any one of which may be a continuing hazard.

19. The climate change some of our craven leaders would like to ignore and of which the current ten-year-long drought is just one manifestation pretty well guarantees that over the next few decades most of the West’s forestland will die off and burn away. Some of the most magnificent country on the planet is becoming unlivable.

20. It is way too late to do anything about this. Such things render the choice between spaghetti and cabbage salad irrelevant.

 

The entire state is stunned over what’s gone on in Yarnell. The loss of almost an entire crew of Western firefighting’s best and brightest leaves everyone floundering, struggling to comprehend.

Heavenly Gardens Community College has a firefighting program. Many of our students are at the college specifically because of that program, and so often some of the young people drawn there move through my classes. And one of my all-time favorites, a quiet guy who so loved the outdoors he could barely tolerate sitting inside a classroom but whose writing was superb, went off to fight fires in Wyoming. Checked the list of the deceased and didn’t see his name in it. Thank goodness.

No word today about the fire, whether it’s still consuming the town, or which parts of the town are still standing. The local papers are understandably preoccupied with the 19 deaths and all the activity around them. A British paper has printed some aerial photographs. It’s hard to correlate the mental map of Yarnell with the devastation seem from a helicopter, but if the image seen in the seventh photo in that series correlates with a Google or Mapquest version of the street map, what I think is La Maya & La Bethulia’s house looks unscathed.

Maybe.

Presumably it will be days or even weeks before people are allowed back in there.

Speaking of days, weeks, and profound doldrums, the Mayo finally called back with appointment dates and times for me to get still more X-rays and then meet with a rheumatologist out there. “Out there” is their Scottsdale clinic, which is halfway to Payson from my house.

The timing couldn’t be more perfect: today the excruciating pain acts like it would like to resolve itself. Pain scale is about a 4 on a scale of 1 to 10, down from 8 the day before yesterday and 6 yesterday. Today I can almost walk normally, and forcing myself to walk without a lurch hurts little more than the Frankenstein tromp. Apparently it’s calmed down to the point where the anti-spasmodic has a noticeable effect, which has not been the case for lo! these past two weeks. Heh…They’ve got me scheduled the middle of next month, by which time presumably no symptoms will be evident.

Cripes. What a grand medical system we have.

I’ve come to the conclusion that Young Dr. Kildare’s initial guess — pinched nerve, not muscle spasms — was probably correct, and his second, most recent guess — degenerative hip disease — is probably wrong. The pain is in the back, not in the hip. Give me a marker and I can draw a circle around it, just to the right of the tailbone. That is NOT hip pain. What we have is referred pain from a back problem.

Image: Yarnell Hill fire with firefighters. U.S. Department of Agriculture. Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.

 DAY-UM!!!!!

Just as I was about to hit “Publish,” I knocked a glass over. It exploded all over the living room floor, shooting shrapnel under, over, and on top of the sofa. And half the other furniture, too. And splashing liquid all over the floor and under the sofa.

The floor needs to be cleaned. It was already covered with dog hair before Charley showed up for a four-day visit, and by the time M’hijito retrieved the retriever, the dog dunes were up to my ankles. But I’ve been putting it off because just limping up the hall hurts like the dickens — the last thing I’ve felt like doing is hauling a vacuum and a mop around.

So now I got to drag the coffee table aside and heave the eight-foot sofa across the room, scrub up water and the old dried-on coffee one of my charming clients spilled all over and under the sofa and vacuum up all that broken glass and as long as the damn vacuum cleaner was out go through the whole house and suck up pounds of dog hair.

Every push on that vacuum feels like someone is shoving a dagger into my hip. OW WOW  WOWWWWW!!!! God, but it hurts!

So…now the pain level is up from 4 to 8. Again.

So much stuff I thôt I wuz gonna get done to day… Guess not!